Dormant Videos

January 16, 2026 at 10:42 AM EST

Editing with DaVinci Resolve

writing

Intro

I had a lot of dance/juggling/music footage sleeping on hard drives organized neatly into labeled folders. That’s great and all, but it’s quite intimidating to revisit old videos even for fun. Albeit well-structured, it takes time and energy to handpick and watch the relevant ones. Making montages with DaVinci Resolve was a smart way to enjoy them. I saved heaps of space by editing the videos into montages/compilations. In my case, I didn’t care about the quality or about publicly uploading them hence the mp4 format (I like compactness). Boring fact, I only keep a main folder on my desktop which contains the folders I use the most (roughly 15GB). If I’m not frequently accessing items, they’re getting deleted or transformed. Hoarding is not my cup of barley tea.

Workflow

Although I’m still a beginner, I recommend this video by George Kamenov for optimizing your workflow (shortcuts for split clip and ripple delete). From there, you can watch related videos which draw your interest. Also, I think you’ll best learn shortcuts when you need them. Swapping clips with ⇧ ⌘ , is one of my favorite shortcuts. I’ll present some here—keyboard customization is a good starting point*.

*: Note that the shortcuts are for Mac.

People are amazing

The free version of Resolve (still excellent) doesn’t include the feature to auto-generate subtitles. Luckily, there’s AutoSubs by Tom Moroney which does the job. Whenever I stumble upon such creations, I think: “Holy macaroni, people are amazing”. It gives me a mental boost.

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